and our dreams will break the boundaries of our fear
by alectorine
Summary: She'd come to Mitakihara with a storm at her back, and now again, the tarred skies waiting for the very last of something to trigger the flood. Certain it was going to happen, but watching for the when, regardless; the same kind of detached fascination afforded to a train careening across a movie screen, or a pitcher winding up on the mound, or the climax of a song.


_notes: for admiralgodunov, as part of the 2014 femslash exchange. some slight changes from original ao3 version. this fic is set during one of the discarded timelines, so a few events/sequences have been altered for the sake of plot. all concrit greatly appreciated!_

* * *

><p>The World's<br>not wanton  
>only wild and wavering<p>

- Adrienne Rich

* * *

><p><em>Once upon a time, the world was a withered thing, and the people rested their palms on the bone-dry earth and wondered what they would become. Then the skies split open at the seams like someone had dug a finger into the soft ashy clouds, sagging under the weight of a thousand oceans. There had never been anything more beautiful.<em>

* * *

><p><em>It's going to rain<em>, Kyouko thinks, when she arrives in Mitakihara. Overhead, the sky rumbles its discontent, the clouds swollen with the promise of a torrential downpour. Every now and again a few hesitant drops break open against the concrete. The air is uncomfortably still, inert, as if the city itself is holding its breath for the imminent storm.

Might wait for the storm to pass, scout around the city a bit before confronting the new magical girl. Kyouko scopes out a vacated apartment to set up base and double-checks her supplies. All good, she's operating within her limits. She rips open a fresh carton of Pocky. Mami's spiced-honey magic is stamped all over Mitakihara, permeating the city to its core, but no matter. It's her territory now, after all, and she's got time to make it her own.

* * *

><p>This is how the story starts:<p>

A girl makes a deal with the devil. It weaves magnetic force between the syllables of her father's words and fashions her a chain-linked spear in return for a new harvest of grief seeds. And her soul, of course, because demonic entanglements are hardly complete without a metaphorically resonant sacrifice of humanity, but she won't know that until much, much later.

A girl makes a deal with the devil. It knits back together the flesh of the boy she loves and clothes her in pleated blue in return for her services as a protector of the city. She tells herself she is happy because she has everything she ever wished for, all she needed was a purpose, but her soul cannot be so easily fooled.

We will only warn you once - this is not a story with a happy ending.

* * *

><p>Kyouko subsides into terse silence against the wall back at base, tearing out lumps of stale bread to mop up the dregs of a rich black sauce. The fight's still seething in her veins, the rookie magical girl - she even had a <em>cape<em>, a literal honest-to-God white cape - stupid enough to bring her little friend along so she could play the hero, as if hunting witches was some kind of wholesome school camping trip. And Kyouko's wasted too much magic on her now to just let her go. She grits her teeth as she retrieves her soul gem, a shade dimmer than before, one step closer to depleting her grief seed reserve. She'll mark this trip up as reconnaissance - that familiar will sprout into a witch soon, and at least now she's got an idea of what she's up against.

The girl's dead meat walking. Kyouko knows girls like her, the type who think they're the protagonists of some sprawling fantasy epic, vanquishing the forces of darkness with nothing more than conviction, audacity, and the power of narrative convention. Life's a bestseller with her name splashed across the front cover. In this line of work, idealists are a dime a dozen, and they all break sooner rather than later.

* * *

><p>Let's say that one day a girl reforges herself into a fairytale. Let's say that one day she folds her hands together like the leaves of a book and rolls the word around in her mouth: hero. If she's good and noble and just, if she vanquishes the forces of darkness like a hero should, then that makes her a hero, too. That means she crushes her foes, collects a merry band of ragged but loyal friends on the way, and gets the boy. That means she deserves a happy ending, or at least a beautifully orchestrated redemption through death, and songs will be written of her bravery and kindness, and her legacy will endure through centuries.<p>

She'll have the world unfurled before her. She'll be remembered.

* * *

><p>Sakura Kyouko is born into the belly of a late-July heatwave, screaming at the shock of the world's pulse all around her, red-faced and slippery in her mother's grip. Summer's implacable climate and climatic implacability wound through her blood from the start. Her father fills out her birth certificate with a diligent hand, the beginnings of this priest's child taking shape stroke by stroke - Kyouko's a good name, a solid name. One that promises a decent future at the upper echelons of mediocrity. Happiness derived through routine, and predictability, and wanting nothing more than what you had and what you could reasonably hope to have.<p>

(Later, of course, a small white creature shows up on her windowsill and - )

Like most small children, she's a dreamer. Her mother tells her stories about the world waiting for her once she's grown into it, its breadth barely comprehensible, brimming with stars and oceans and far-flung lands. Kyouko presses her body to the grass outside the church and looks up at the perfect shell of cloudless blue blurring into the ground somewhere too far away to fathom, and thinks, _if only I could see past_ -

The thing is, when you are young, you do get everything delivered directly into your hands. Childhood is nothing but a transitory state between helplessness and self-sufficiency, learning to take what you aren't given. The only mistake is forgetting that eventually, you will have to knock away your stabilisers and take that first final step.

* * *

><p>Things Sakura Kyouko Will Probably Never Tell Herself, Part I:<p>

- To be honest, pain, like all other things in your life, is only finite. You get used to it. You learn to bury it deep enough that you can almost forget it was ever there. Maybe it doesn't get better, not really, but it becomes manageable, which is nearly the same thing, anyway.

- This should never have been something that you needed to know.

* * *

><p>A deleted scene:<p>

It would take a miracle, Kyousuke had said, his fingers twitching with an old bittered frustration. Sayaka hurries down the whitewashed hallways nursing a jittery excitement - finally, finally, she can do something, she can help. It leaves her breathless, exultant, the fact that the power to change things is now completely within her reach. He might never know it was her, but she doesn't mind; a true hero's work is always done masked and costumed, a true hero needs no acknowledgement of her gallant deeds! Nevertheless, once he - if he found out, surely he'd be - grateful that she made her wish for him, and maybe -

It would take a miracle, but Sayaka can make one happen.

She skids out of the hospital doors into the bracing prickle of the night air. Kyuubey materialises at her side, which is still unnerving, but if she's going to be a - _a magical girl_, it will all be part of the acclimatisation process. And she'll have _powers_, and a _weapon_, and a special outfit, too; she imagines Madoka's admiring expression with a private satisfaction.

_Are you ready to make your wish?_ Kyuubey asks.

"I think so, but, um, just a question, first. Are we allowed to wish on someone else's behalf? As in, a wish that won't actually apply to me?"

_Certainly!_

"Also, if I were," Sayaka pauses, mouth suddenly gone dry. _I'm going to save Kyousuke_, she tells herself firmly, and swallows down her trepidation, "say, if I were to wish for something that wasn't technically possible, not through human means or technology or anything, would that still be okay?"

_Anything is possible,_ Kyuubey says cheerfully, _if you make a contract with me!_

* * *

><p>Let's say that one day a girl comes home to find her sister dead, her mother dead, her father's body suspended from the rafters. Let's say that one day a girl closes shaking fingers around her soul and screams and screams and thereafter never cries again, not even when the worst of the hunger pains are wracking through her body, not even when the devil tells her that her oldest friend is dead, not even when she is standing before a corruption of the girl she could have loved in another universe, finally someone she will not have to outlive.<p>

Survival is a funny thing. It marks the living with the indelible print of death, no longer a simple state of existence but now something conscious: your lungs siphoning oxygen, your heart singing out from its cavity within your chest, an endless awareness that you are here, you are alive, you are alive. This is all you have. This is all you get.

The instinct to survive overrides all other reservations built into the human mind. Dressed-up morality and saviour complexes can be postponed for a day when anything becomes a right simply by virtue of existence. You only ever do what you can to survive, and hope that the world will react accordingly.

* * *

><p>Cradling a bag of apples in one arm, Kyouko finds herself standing outside Sayaka's window. The pavement drenched with sticky pools of sunlight and latticed shadow. Thousands of girls Kyuubey could have contracted, and Kyouko ends up meeting Sayaka, a creature of righteous purpose who's decided to dedicate her life to pursuing the direct opposite of Kyouko's aims. What it would be like to start over, she thinks. What it would be like to believe you could have anything you wanted, because you didn't know any better, or maybe because you simply didn't care, looking beyond the horizon line for no other reason than the fact that you could, the world unimaginably infinite and unimaginably beautiful.<p>

It would not be difficult to end this here. Chalk it up to a negligible emotional blunder and walk away. Everyone's allowed the occasional error in judgement, and all momentum can be converted into forward motion, in the end.

Kyouko snorts. As if she'd come all the way out here to back out at the last minute. It's not like it has to be her final decision; there's still time. _Hey dumbass, come out for a moment. We need to talk,_ she says, and waits.

They walk down the path into the forest together, Kyouko holding a decidedly one-sided conversation around a mouthful of apple with an uncharacteristically reticent Sayaka. She's not surprised Sayaka doesn't feel too talkative. Discovering that the body she'd been maintaining so carefully wasn't even hers anymore had been - a blow, but as always its needs, her mind's needs, her soul's needs took priority. She'd save the philosophical bullshit about humanity or whatever for later.

Kyouko takes a left, and before them, an old church, jutting out from the ground like the skeletal remains of some hulking primeval creature. She remembers the congregations that used to gather in its ribs, dwindling away and then flocking to her father like birds called home to roost. How blessed she thought she'd been, then, Sakura Kyouko, restorer of faith and fortune.

"This was my dad's church," Kyouko says. She kicks down the door and steps over the threshold. Inside, the church is a decrepit wreck, almost unearthly bathed in the orange glow, the walls pockmarked with sprays of incidental light, the shards of coloured glass still in their frame grimy with dust and ash.

"Why did you bring me here?"

"Bit of a long story," replies Kyouko. The corner of her mouth quirks up unbidden. "You might want to settle in. Here, have one."

Kyouko tosses her an apple and Sayaka, she, she, she throws it to the floor like it's nothing. Kyouko's body reacts before the instinctive wrench of panic that never fails to follow seizes her muscles. She swipes for the apple, polishing it furiously on her sleeve. Hisses something reflexive about wasting food. Sayaka says something in response, but what would she know, she's never felt hunger so vast it left her perched feverishly on the brink of unconsciousness, never watched a familiar devour some unwitting stranger off the street, gripping her soul gem like a rosary, their life weighed against her own and found wanting.

They say the human body is not built to remember pain, but hunger burrows far too deep to be uprooted so easily, the feel of it coiled hard within her abdomen, visceral, ravenous, hollowing her down to the marrow. Hunger is always scratching at the edges of her mind. All Kyouko can do is take what she can, swallowing down desperate mouthfuls of whatever she manages to find, hoarding the rest as jealously as her spare grief seeds. The most primitive of instincts, but Kyouko has never pretended she is above that. Witches eat humans. She eats witches. She eats burnt bread and overcooked cakes of sticky rice salvaged from the back of the bakery, she eats creams and cheeses teetering on spoiled, she eats raw wilted vegetables, anything, everything. In Kasamino she'd carved out a routine, starting at the dumpsters behind the block of ramen restaurants and finishing at the supermarket where they always threw out stock at least half a week before its expiry date, and it makes her sick to think of all that food going to waste when she can't afford to treat her next meal as a certainty, but Mitakihara is prime witch-hunting grounds, and the maintenance of her soul gem has to take precedence over everything else. Knowing that magic alone can sustain her body doesn't make it any easier. It's just another appetite she has to satisfy.

Kyouko is not the girl she once was. Maybe that makes Sayaka a better person or something, and Kyouko will probably never know why she tells this to Sayaka, only that once upon a time a girl looked out at the crease between sky and sea and thought herself more than that. Sayaka still thinks she's capable of saving people. Kyouko needs her to understand that she doesn't have to, that the scales are already even, that magical girls can take things back. If you owe nothing to anybody, the only person you're held accountable to is yourself. As long as you accept that then you'll never have anything to regret. Bodies heaped before an altar. Cakes and broken teacups. Girls speared through the throat. There's nothing to atone for, not when it comes to survival.

"I'm sorry," Sayaka says, at the end of it all. "I had the wrong idea about you in the beginning. But I can't accept that. I have these powers for a reason, I chose this for a reason, and I won't go back. You promised yourself that you'd only ever live for yourself, and I've promised myself that I won't ever regret helping others."

Like it had ever been a choice in the first place. Kyouko stares at her, disbelief crystallising into frustration. "You still think it's worth it?

"Yes," says Sayaka. "Of course. It will always be worth it. I can do amazing things with the power I've been given, how can I just use it for my own sake? No, I'll fight my battles my own way. Feel free to try and kill me again if you've got a problem."

* * *

><p>An indefinite number of years ago, a race of small white creatures took it upon themselves to find a method of preventing the end of their universe. Eventually they settled on the puella magi system: one wish granted for the output of enough energy to overcome entropy itself. Magical girl to witch, and in the moment of her greatest despair the Incubators would take their harvest; scattered throughout history, the mark of the Incubators on young women the world over.<p>

The process of forming a contract requires a puella magi's body to be fortified so that she may fight unhindered by human limitations. Scaffolding her naivete by transplanting the soul into a new structure. There appears to be a correlation between the length of survival as a puella magi and the energy released during transformation into a witch, and after all, the Incubators are in the business of conserving that energy.

This system hasn't always worked perfectly. Early puellae magi would succumb to despair far too quickly, or die from the shock of the contracting operation, or fall prey to any number of inconsequential glitches the Incubators happened to overlook, but like any experiment the method was refined over time as they grew accustomed to the oddities of human nature. The strange aversion to having their soul removed, for example, leading to that particular piece of information being withheld from potential contractees. Human sentimentality is a peculiar thing.

It could be said that the creation of such a doomed cycle is cruel. Well, who knows? It's all simply a matter of perspective.

* * *

><p>The cautionary growl of thunder accosts Kyouko on her way back after a successful food trip. She pauses, in case she's misheard and she's actually safe, but there's no mistaking the dusty, electric smell of an approaching storm. A light shower springs up, then, the kind that threatens to topple into angry pelting before you've even had time to wrestle an umbrella out, or curse and run for cover if you, like Kyouko, are one of the unfortunate umbrella-deprived few.<p>

Kyouko swears through her last mouthful of pastry, glaring at the sky with extreme distaste, and ducks into a nearby music shop, some quaint, cozily-lit den of posturing hipsters offhandedly one-upping each other in their knowledge of obscure dead artists and probably a few sad individuals actually browsing for the latest Tchaikovsky release or something. To her increasing unsurprise, her eyes alight on a shock of blue hair, and she briefly weighs the prospect of walking back out and being rained upon against the irritation that seems to result every time she even tries to - to talk, communicate, whatever. Whatever. Not like it matters. Might as well get the opening shots out of the way.

She strolls over to where Sayaka is taking advantage of the store's sample playlists and peers at the song title. Sayaka pointedly ignores her. "Huh, _Beethoven_," Kyouko says, intentionally mangling the syllables, right next to Sayaka's ear with the expectation that free-trial headphones can't have the greatest external soundproofing quality. "Classy. What's the song like?"

"It's got some interesting stylistic choices," Sayaka replies, without taking off the earphones, and Kyouko hears the_, not that you'd know anything about that_ silently tacked onto the end. Well, if Sayaka thinks she can get rid of her by tossing around a few fancy words, she'd better pick up her game.

Kyouko leans against the CD racks. "Hmm. Keep going, tell me more."

Sayaka levels her with a deeply distrustful stare, as if suspecting Kyouko of attempting to ensnare her morally upstanding soul in a devious net of depravity and classical music trivia. "Normally, musical pieces will have some sort of resolution - you know what, here, listen," she says, shoving the earphones at her, "a perfect cadence, which starts on the dominant, or a plagal cadence, which starts on the subdominant, to end on the tonic chord - that's the main key of the piece, so the whole thing feels finished. This one in particular is unusual because it ends on - "

"An imperfect cadence, yeah," finishes Kyouko, handing the earphones back. "What?" she says, at Sayaka's incredulous eyebrows. "Surprised I actually know something? Blah blah blah, tonic to dominant, creates an unfinished feeling that leads straight into the next movement, whatever."

A pause. Then a cautious offer: "I didn't know you were the musical sort."

Kyouko jams her hands into her jacket pockets, bites back the instinctive _you wouldn't even care_ _unless_ he_ was_. A tired resentment coiling around her limbs. "I'm not. I just remember some shit from my old church choir lessons." It is not untrue. The past always has a way of making its presence felt. Sayaka looks at her with eyes as wide and utterly unknowable as the moon. "Eh, it looks like it's going to be raining pretty heavily," Kyouko says, the only concession she'll allow herself to make. "You might want to head home soon."

She'd come to Mitakihara with a storm at her back, and now again, the tarred skies waiting for the very last of something to trigger the flood. Certain it was going to happen, but watching for the _when_, regardless; the same kind of detached fascination afforded to a train careening across a movie screen, or a pitcher winding up on the mound, or the climax of a song.

* * *

><p>Things Sakura Kyouko Will Probably Never Tell Herself, Part II:<p>

- If your life itself is the only thing left to you, then you'd better be damn sure that you're making the right transactions with it.

- Miki Sayaka has never listened to you.

- There are many things you want to tell her - life doesn't work that way, you aren't entitled to shit - but none of them will save her.

* * *

><p>She finds Homura waiting for her at the arcade. Hollowed out by the tinny fluorescence of the pinball machines, she could have been standing there for centuries, skin fossilising under the mechanised glare and all the more remote for it. A living clockwork construct, like something straight out of a storybook.<p>

The girl is a puzzle. A veteran who's made no attempt to claim Mitakihara for her own, or do anything much besides show up at inopportune times before diffusing back into the shadows again. She's hiding something, but then again, they all are; you don't last that long as a magical girl without the weight of a few proverbial skeletons tucked between your shoulderblades.

"Walpurgisnacht is coming," says Homura. Her tone is smooth enough to skip stones across. "I need your help to defeat it."

Kyouko grins assessingly. "What's in it for me?"

"I'll buy you lunch," replies Homura, which is as good a reason as any, so Kyouko shrugs and gestures for her to lead the way.

"So," says Kyouko, snapping her chopsticks apart with relish, when they've settled into a booth at a classy little establishment off the side of the road, the artificial light cutting swathes of white across the linoleum. "Talk."

Homura talks. Kyouko slurps the last of her chanpon down and taps her fingers against the bowl.

"Sure, okay, keep the new kids out of it, makes sense," she says. She's feeling charitable today, free lunch and all things considered. Kyouko might be solitary by nature, or nurture, really, but she isn't in the business of lying to herself, and besides, Homura approached her first. "Alright then, guess that means I'm in. Thanks for the food, but I've got places to be."

"Miki Sayaka is a time bomb," Homura says quietly, just as Kyouko's slid out of her seat. "You don't want to be caught up in the fallout. She isn't - it isn't worth it."

Kyouko doesn't waste breath asking how she knows. "You should finish that before it gets cold," she says instead. And maybe she's still a rookie after all, because Homura's careful expression cracks open, gutted by something too visceral to subsume. It's desperation. As heavy as a shroud and just as inevitable. Overwhelming in its familiarity, the tines of it pulling at Kyouko's own skin in the vestiges of muscle memory, even as Homura forces it shut.

She thinks then that there is no one alive more uniquely suited to understanding her than Akemi Homura. Both of them building their own pyres, and still affecting surprise when the eventual conflagration finds them inconsolable amidst all the profusion of plangent light.

* * *

><p>The witch is an indignantly-flapping conglomerate of what appears to be an open book and a kitchen stove, fluttering around in its mock-classroom barrier accompanied by the occasional burst of flame. On her way to the arcade, Kyouko had happened across the entrance saturated with the scent of Sayaka's magic, and somehow ended up here, fending off paper airplane missiles alongside her like they were some kind of team.<p>

"I could be at the arcade beating my own high scores right now, you know," Kyouko calls. She slices apart a lamp-shaped familiar. The instinct of self-preservation is hard to unlearn, even as she's casually disregarding all of her own limits for the sake of a girl she barely knows and mostly dislikes. She just - doesn't want to see her own mistakes reflected back at her, is all.

"I didn't ask for your help," Sayaka grits out, hacking away at the witch's metallic grating. An airplane hurtles towards her and she barely manages to avoid being gored in the shoulder. Her arms straining as she brings her sword down, again and again.

Something's off about Sayaka. Her plays aren't normally this reckless. She's messing up, even for a rookie -

And that's when she sees it. Kyouko almost staggers back. Sayaka's soul gem is - it isn't just dull or dimmed or murky, it's nearly _black._ Filthy with neglect. Darker than she'd thought it was possible for a soul gem to be. The sight of it is horrifyingly nauseatingly viscerally wrong. By some profound stroke of sheer dumb luck, Sayaka manages to land the killing blow; Kyouko snatches a half-moon glimpse of her upturned face, expression unreadable.

The barrier disintegrates and Kyouko does a quick perfunctory sweep for grief seeds. No luck. She spins back around to face Sayaka. "What the fuck," she says slowly, the rabbit-heart thrumming of her blood playing counterpoint in her ears. "What are you doing to yourself, Sayaka?"

Sayaka straightens. Drags the tip of her sword up. "I'm doing my duty as a magical girl. Back off."

"Are you fucking kidding me? Being a magical girl means playing live bait for - not even witches, that can't have been more than an overgrown familiar! Just, just, just swallow your pride for a moment and listen to me, let me _help_, I have some spare grief seeds - "

"Save it," snarls Sayaka. "I don't want your _pity_." She jerks a hand and an array of swords screeches towards Kyouko. On instinct Kyouko throws herself forward, hurls her spear out on its chains to yank Sayaka's arm away as the blades clatter to the ground beneath her. She hits the pavement running, the impact juddering up her legs, Sayaka slashing wildly at her, at the sparking snap of her spear, her blade arcing through the air, the keen of metal against metal.

"Pity?" Kyouko gasps out. "This isn't pity, this is me trying to stop you from throwing yourself away on some stupid suicide mission, you - don't you care that you're going to hurt, don't you know by now that it hurts and it won't ever stop hurting until you die -" She whirls around, flinging her spear back out. But instead of parrying, Sayaka stumbles, transforms back. Kyouko's spear slips from fingers abruptly gone nerveless. They're close enough that she can see the pallid sunken hollows of Sayaka's cheeks, the charcoal smears beneath her eyes a weak echo of her soul gem.

A tectonic shift in the atmosphere between them, and, carefully, deliberately, Sayaka curls a hand around Kyouko's cheekbone, and then there is nothing in the world except her own harsh breathing and Sayaka's thumb brushing across her skin, Sayaka's fingers cradling her jaw. The moment shatters; Sayaka blinks, shocked, and she lets her hand fall. Kyouko releases a shaky exhale buried somewhere between a sob and a sigh, throat tight with an ancient sort of horror. In that terrifying moment she had almost allowed herself to want for more than what she could ever hope to have. She won't be walking away, not anymore.

"What would you know," Sayaka says, jarringly soft.

_I know,_ Kyouko wants to shout, _I know because you are the girl I used to be, could have been, I know because you're killing yourself and I_

_don't_

_want_

_you_

_to_

_die_

and she surges forward to fit her mouth to Sayaka's, pouring all the things she could never say into the seam of her lips, Sayaka the moon and Kyouko the oceans rising helplessly to meet her each time. Drawn together by forces of their own engineering. Sayaka clutches at her shoulders like she's drowning and kisses her back, and Kyouko prays, frantic, irrational, that this is enough. That she is enough.

* * *

><p><em>Once upon a time, the world had festered and the rivers choked with filth and decay. Then the great flooding rains roared down to swallow all the wickedness whole, shattering civilisations like matchsticks, drowning the earth in glassy blue. There had never been anything more terrible.<em>

* * *

><p>The air in the station is silent, stagnant, static. Sayaka's soul gem is the colour of an incoming storm.<p>

* * *

><p><em>Tomoe Mami is dead<em>, Kyuubey says.

Kyouko does not falter. The past is a distraction she can't afford to indulge in, and Mami, with her ribbons and teacups and brittle kindness, was never going to last, anyway. Perhaps she tears into her takoyaki a little more ferociously. "Guess I'll be moving shop, then. Can't let a real estate opportunity like that pass me by."

Kyuubey's tail flicks. _One of Mami's protégés has already taken over her territory. She made a contract with me a few hours ago!_

"So I'll just have to crush her before she gets too big for her boots," and then, under her breath, "Mami always did like taking in strays."

The light slats across the road in long clean bars. Kyouko tosses the takoyaki skewer into a bin and stretches languidly. She'll check up on that rosebush familiar that's been threatening to ripen into a mature witch for the past few days, maybe wrangle a grief seed out of it, before she leaves. Her soul gem an untarnished crimson, her appetite sated for now. The world will only be kind when you force it to be. The new girl won't be a problem.

* * *

><p>"Do you want to save Miki Sayaka?"<p>

* * *

><p>The witch is a great shifting metallic mass, lurching in fragmented conductor's movements before its orchestra. The auditorium hollow, the shadows contorting as though seen through water. Kyouko wants to laugh or maybe tear her eyes out. Sayaka, still playing out somebody else's dream, stubborn until the end.<p>

Around her the cresting screech of violins chafes at her ears. The chance that she could retrieve Sayaka from the monstrosity of what she's become is almost too absurd to even fleetingly consider, the kind of serendipity that only happens in fairytales, and yet -

_An imperfect cadence,_ thinks Kyouko. Tonic to dominant, unfinished, expectant, a promise of things yet to come.

She shifts her grip on her spear, knuckles straining beneath her skin like icebergs. She leaps forward.

* * *

><p>This is how the story ends:<p>

Two girls find themselves trapped in a system that cannot be defeated. One of them gives up on the dream that gave up on her, but the other follows her into the nightmare depths to bring her back to the surface. The air above the tidal plane is as bitter as the water down below.

They have been marked as collateral in a project that has seen the creation of worlds and will see the fall of many more, spanning millions of years and millions of girls making deals with the devil for the same reason: call it love, call it selfishness, call it faith, call it the unbounded desperation to survive. In a proper fairytale they would be saved by a love that transcends despair and desire and all the laws of the universe. And we would like to tell you that Sakura Kyouko reached whatever remnant of Miki Sayaka still imprinted in her grief seed and breathed it to life, and she pressed her trembling mouth to the slope of Sayaka's shoulders in wordless prayer, dizzy with an awful grasping hope. That Sayaka brought her hands up on either side of Kyouko's spine to anchor her there.

The truth is that the metamorphosis of a magical girl into the manifestation of her despair is inevitable and irreversible. Miki Sayaka died, and Sakura Kyouko died with her, and beyond them the stars did not waver in their path and the tides did not slow. Sayaka died with nothing on her lips except regret.

Theirs is not a story meant for legend. This, too, will be erased. But we beg of you, remember this:

In the moments before she made her choice, Kyouko pressed her lips to her shuddering soul like a benediction, or true love's kiss, and thought with a wild clarity - _never alone again._

Doomed from the very beginning, yes, but the decision has always been her own.

* * *

><p><em>If you could have the one thing you want most in the world,<em> the small white creature is saying.


End file.
